Abdul Haleem Syed shows off the project that won him the best student presentation during International Geographic Object Based Image Analysis in Brazil.

Written by

Jinelle Shengulette

Abdul Haleem Syed is trying to take some work off humans and put it on computers, so the machines can better interpret various images, like those taken by satellites or planes.

Typically an image analyst would try to sort out all the data, things such as the number of trees, location roads and buildings or whatever, to produce maps, predict the path of a forest fire or respond to a natural disaster.

"We want a computer to be able to look at an image and say, 'That's a road, that's a building and that's a military compound,'-" said Syed, a doctoral candidate at Rochester Institute of Technology Center ...